Can dissemination of the truth prevent another holocaust? - Rated 
Interestingly the viciousness spat out by Isreal-haters about this book , in the reviews here that are against the book, simply strenghthen the case about just how murderous in their hate , the loathsome enemies of Israel are.
Alan Dershowitz explains in this succinct and balanced work, the situation involving Israel's decades long struggle for survival, against an Arab campaign to annihilate every Jewish man, woman and child in the Land of Israel, or as the anti-Israel hatemongers call it "Palestine."
He objectively go's through the history of the region and explains why the Jews have a right to be there. Indeed, despite the cold-blooded deceptions by the left (especially in academia and the media) the struggle is simply of 5 million Israeli men, women and children just to survive in the little strip of land, which one can barely see on a world map-the ancient homeland of the Jewish people. The right, which the world granted in 1948 through the United Nations, and are now, through the United Nations, academia, the Media, the totalitarian Third world Lobby etc, are now attempting to withdraw.
Dershowitz go's through each canard against the tiny Jewish State one by one , summarizing the spurious charges , and then demolishes them with clear and balanced facts.
He thereby deals with the lies that 'Israel is a Colonialist Imperialist State' , that 'European Jews displaced Palestinians' , that 'The Zionist Movement was a Plot to colonize all of Palestine' that 'Israel Started the Six Day War' , that 'Israel is a Racist , Apartheid State', that 'More Palestinians Have Been Killed Than Israelis' , and many others , debunking them with clear reasonable argument-so that no reasonable person of goodwill can ever disseminate or accept these dishonest libels.
For example , he outlines how the Palestinian strategy of deliberately targeting Israeli women , children and the elderly cannot be compared to the Israeli policy of strictly targeting combatants , even though Arab civillians may sometimes be killed in the crossfire, often because they are deliberately used as human shields by the Palestinian terrorists. How spurious is the repetition of statistics that more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed in the recent war , when an analysis of the facts reveals that the majority of Arabs killed and injured have been armed combatants and the number of Israeli women and children killed and injured is well in excess of the number of Palestinian women and children killed and injured-as many as three times more according to one study.
With regard to the ridiculous charge that Israel is a racist state , Dershowitz points out : "With regard to support for people of color , Israel is truly a nation of color. It has one of the most diverse populations in the world , including black Africans from Ethiopia , brown Africans and Asians from North Africa , Yemen , Egypt , Iraq and Morocco;Jews from Central Asia , Russia and the Caucuses ; and families from Romania , Latin America and the former Yugoslavia. Nelson Mandela was simply wrong when he described Israel as a 'white' nation as contrasted to Iraq , which he called a 'black' nation.
He also deals with the fallacy that people support the Palestinians against Israel , because the Palestinians are percieved as the 'underdog': " Viewed from a global perspective , Israel is clearly the underdog. The Palestinians have the widespread support of a billion Muslims. Add to that the United Nations , , the European community, the third world, the Vatican , many influential academics , the international left , the far right and many Protestant churches. The Palestinians have far more support than the Tibetans , the Kurds , the Armenians , the Chechens and many real underdogs. Moroever the nations that are opressing these other underdog groups-China , Turkey and Russia , are far more powerful than tiny tiny Israel , with the population of approximately 5.37 million Jews and 1.26 million Arabs. Yet these other 'underdogs' recieve little support from those who champion the Palestinians"
The 'Palestinian' terrorist onslaught against the Jewish people in Israel, is every bit as cruel and relentless as that of the Nazis against the Jewish people in Europe 60 years ago. The monstrous and inhumane Arabs that call themselves 'Palestinians' usually target women and children, and are supported today in their unfathomable cruelty, by those who claim to be 'progressive' and 'humane'. It is simply nauseating and frightening to realize that the world has come to this.
Even worse some ultra-left Jews in the Diaspora, have also turned on their fellow Jews in Israel, throwing their influence behind the Arab campaign for a holocaust of Israeli Jewry.
The writer of this book explains that is deception to claim that anti-Israel hatred is not anti-Semitism. After all the people singled out for genocide by the pro-Palestinian lobby are Jews. The fact that they live in Israel does not make them any less so than the victims of the Nazis , because they happened to live in Europe!
Dershowitz, in this work, makes clear the facts that have been obscured and twisted around 180 degrees. Is it too much to hope that if enough of us try to outline the truth, another great and callous injustice against the Jews can be prevented, 60 years after Hitler's holocaust?
Not at all convincing - Rated 
Inaccurate and tendentious throughout. For example, he writes "historians believe that the Hebrews arrived in present-day Israel sometime in the second millennium B.C.E. Under Joshua, and later King David and his successors, independent Hebrew kingdoms existed." In fact, no respected Christian, Jewish or secular historian argues that an independent Hebrew kingdom ever existed under Joshua. Not even the Bible claims that Joshua was a king or had a kingdom! We have no demographic data to support his claim that Jews formed the main part of the population for most of the sixteen hundred years between 1000 BCE and 636 CE.
This cavalier disregard for truth and historical accuracy is typical. Dershowitz is after all a lawyer, not a scholar, trained to make the best possible case for his client, not to investigate the truth. Read instead Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall.
Polemic rather than Scholarship - Rated
Not recommended for anyone wishing to obtain a balanced view of the situation in Israel/Palestine. As a previous reviewer has noted, by dealing with the 'issues' in separate chapters Dershowitz completely loses any context. Having recently returned from Israel I would strongly recommend reading Pappe, Halper, & get on the internet: there are a couple of very good news websites such as IMEMC, & Alternative Information Centre. We are being seriously let down by the international media and this book does nothing to provide balanced information in what is a very complex situation.
Plagiarism? - Rated
I would strongly urge readers to counterbalance this with Norman Finklestein's "Beyond Chutzpah". Finkelstein mounts a strong case that Dershowitz has actually based some of the content of his book on a discredited work by Joan Peters called "From Time Immemorial". The latter is an attempt to prove, amongst other things, that Palestinian refugees in the '48 war had only very recently moved into the area which was to become Israel proper after the war, hence belying their claims to being "real" refugees from the same area post '48. The book, in my view, has been shown, by Finkelstein (Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict) to be speculative at best. The same critique by Finkelstein also presents a strong (and to my knowledge uncontested) case that Peters' case is not even made in good faith. For example, checking her sources, Finkelstein notes severe misrepresentation. This even goes as far as ellipsis points in Peters' text in place of words which negate precisely the sentence Peters presents in the text (a bit like me quoting someone who wrote "Finkelstein has no qualifications to talk about Israel" as saying "Finkelstein has ... qualifications to talk about Israel".)Yehoshua Porath (Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) wrote a review of Peter's book in the New York Review of Books (Vol 32 Number 21 January 1986) in which he wrote: "The unfortunate thing about Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984) is that from a position of apparently great learning and research, she attempts to refute the Arab myths merely by substituting the Jewish myths for them."
Now the point here is that Dershowitz, aware of the debunking of Peters' book, clearly relies on it in "The Case for Israel". This is no major offence in itself. It may lower his credibility amongs specialists in the field, but beyond that I guess he is entitled to source as he sees fit. A bigger issue going to the heart of Dershowitz' academic integrity is that, as Finkelstein has shown in the first cited book above, Dershowitz does not make proper attribution of his use of Peters' discredited book in his "Case For Israel". Finkelstein makes a very strong case that Dershowitz relies directly on Peters for portions of his book, without consistently noting his reliance (he makes proper attribution for part of his total reliance - 8 citations). He quotes - ostensibly from primary sources - but repeating Peters' mistakes in quotation, mistakes in phrase-coinage and so forth, which suggest he did not read those sources at all! In a debate between Dershowitz and Finkelstein to be found here (www.democracynow.org) Dershowitz repeatedly insists that the cited passages will be found in the sources he cites. For me this is not a point of dispute. Neither is it really relevant whether what Dershowitz has done is to be called "plagiarism". (This was not the case with Finkelstein, who did accuse Dershowitz of plagiarism). The heart of the question is the respect we are to accord a purported scholar whose work draws, without consistent attribution, on the work of another.
Recent events have taken an ironic turn. Finkelstein has been denied tenure based on the "ad hominem" nature of some of his work (his work can be highly vituperative. But we must distinguish attitude from scholarship. Oxford Professor of International relations Avi Shlaim sounds ringing endorsements of Finkelstein's scholarship, though he also complains about Finkelstein's tone). Were Dershowitz to come under the same exacting standards, then he might begin to regret writing his "Case for Israel"
A Pointless Exercise - Rated
Dershowitz can at best be described as biased. His work is not a scholarly piece, and one can only hope that its vile contents are not absorbed by the hapless feeble minded. I wholeheartedly recommend that you look elsewhere for your information on this area. Try Said, Pappe, Shlaim, or Chomsky for instance.
As an aside, Mearsheimer and Walt's 'The Israel Lobby' is also worthy of
attention.
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